


make it easy, say I never mattered

by capra



Series: young volcanoes [1]
Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Lonliness, M/M, Multi, Overheard Sex, Phone Sex, Polyamory, Secret Relationship, Vaginal Sex, Voyeurism, about how he opens up and relaxes around them, about how important his people are to him, college angst, healthy support networks are everything, i have a lot of feelings about how joyful he's been recently, i love him so much, knife shoes appreciation society, knife shoes senior circuit, ksas, kssc, nathan's a nerd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-10-06 13:16:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17345900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capra/pseuds/capra
Summary: “The worst missing is you guys. It’s absolutely the worst part of being out here, missing you guys.”Nathan found himself in a brand new relationship right before moving to the other side of the continent.It gets tough, sometimes.





	make it easy, say I never mattered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chupacabra (butyoumight)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/butyoumight/gifts).



> This is for my spouse Trey.
> 
> Title from "Young Volcanoes" by Fall Out Boy, which is also one of the two songs I played on loop-one while writing this. The other is Fire Burning On the Dance Floor by Sean Kingston, because Nathan was riffing it in Romain's IG instastory. ( twitter.com/aboutNathan0505/status/1082077578133934080 ) Of the two, though, it's this author's humble opinion that Young Volcanoes makes a better song to fuck to. 
> 
> *
> 
> As a blanket disclaimer: any and ALL non-monogamy depicted in my fics is entered into consensually by all partners and metamors, unless EXPLICITLY noted in the tags or description of the fic.
> 
> This story is based on a narrow range of cherrypicked personality qualities culled from my personal and very biased interpretation of the publically available personas of real human beings who are, I am quite certain, not similar at all to how they're depicted here.
> 
> In short, it's complete fiction.

 

Tues Oct 16 - october break →

Weds Oct 17 - project filming @ rink 2p, call liz

  


Thurs Oct 18 - Sun 21 - Marie-france @ montreal??

figure out timing, ask papa/ciz

  


Mon Oct 22 classes -->

  


Friday Oct 26 - midterm

|    


Friday Nov 16 - nov break→

  


Nov 20 - flight

Nov 21 practices

Nov 22 op practice

  


Nov 23 -25 IDF (romain, marin)     

  


Monday Nov 26 - classes →

  
| 

Weds - Sun Dec 5 - 9 GPF

  


Friday Dec 7 - class end/reading period -->

Mon Dec 10 - spanish oral

Weds Dec 12 - last day, reading period

Thurs Dec 13 - finals begin oof

  


Weds Dec 19 - finals end

Thurs Dec 20 - flight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  


Jan 14 spring term begins  
  
---|---|---  
  
 

The density of ink on his calendar disturbs him. Obviously no one thought this was going to be easy - least of all him - but still. Still, it’s a white planner and black ink - mostly, except for blue in some places - and yet he’s really starting to think there’s more ink than paper here. This calendar is made of ink with paper embellishment.

Infrastructure, provides his brain, _infraestructura_ . Was that even _in_ this week’s chapter, or is he making things up at this point? Neither option seems more or less probable.

There’s chatter out in the rest of the suite, a startled yell, laughter - it’s a Tuesday night. The midterm is behind them, and the finals ahead, but for his suitemates - for the entire rest of the campus - there’s plenty of time to get there. Not every moment needs to be scheduled.

 _That’s unfair,_ says his brain, _You don’t know what everyone else in this campus is doing. Maybe there’s a premed student who’s also working two jobs._

It’s a figure of speech, Nathan reminds his brain, and he gets the distinct impression that his brain scrunches its nose at him in irritation.

Whatever. As established, while perhaps not the _entire_ rest of the Yale campus was breathing easy, Nathan did not have that luxury. So, snooty brain or no, he’d better get back to work.  The oral exam wasn’t going to pass itself.

 _Habla extemporánea,_ says his brain.

* * * *

He had tried to quit social media. At the start of the semester, when good intentions made anything seem possible. But September for college students is like January for everyone else, and like New Years’ resolutions, most of his good intentions didn’t even survive the month.

Still, cutting back, that much he’d managed to go through with. Which meant a whole lot of snaps and instastories that expired unseen. By the end of September, most of his more distant friends, the Facebook ones mostly, had figured out that there was no point tagging him in stuff that he wasn’t going to see, and those notifications dropped off by a lot. In mid-October, the NBA preseason ended, the regular season started, and Nathan missed it all, too deep in his work for more than a quick scroll of his timeline - and after a while, not even that.

It sucked, to put it lightly, and he said as much in a short tweet on his basketball stan account before putting his phone down and dragging his attention back to his textbook reading. When he checked his mentions later, most of his close mutuals had liked the tweet, one told him to get back to studying, and a couple commisserated. ‘Oof,’ they said mostly, as well as “big oof, man” and “mood.”

Romain texted him later that night, and Colin called, and he griped to them about missing out and his crazy workload and how sick he was of dorm cafeteria food. Colin engaged with the complaints the same way he did everything in the world: as a puzzle problem to be solved. He meant well, but Nathan wasn’t really looking for solutions, and Colin’s engineer brain doesn’t really know how to _not_ offer them. But it helped to hear his voice.

“Only six weeks to break, Nate. You can do this.”

“Glad you think so,” Nathan laughed, and didn’t say _I have an atomic clock in my brain that’s counting down to each deadline I’m facing, and knowing that I’m running out of time isn’t actually reassuring, actually it’s very much the opposite._  Again - Colin meant well.

Romain’s reply - only one text, three words - was considerably more soothing.

 

>   
> 
> 
> me: its getting to the point that my brain is swimming as soon as i wake up
> 
> me: i cant remember what just chillin out feels like
> 
> me: i cannot do this again man
> 
> me: feels bad
> 
> Main man: just fuck it
> 
>   
> 

Nathan _felt_ those three words, his _own_ words, hit his sternum, a punch right between his lungs.

They meant Pyeonchang and Milan. Olympics and Worlds. They meant: Seventeenth place? _just fuck it_ . Five quads - six quads in the free, eight in the competition. _Just fuck it._

Right, Nathan thought, and the knotted fist of stress around his heart loosened up. _I’ve fucking got this._

‘Owe you one,’ he texted back, and Romain answered that one with a single emoji, winking with tongue out.

Shortly thereafter, Mariah sent him his own tweet back in a text, covered in sympathetic heart emojis, and told him she’d snuggle up next to him and summarize everything he’s missed for him, if she could. Nathan razzed back that he appreciated the thought but she’d probably get all the details wrong, basketball is all about tracking stats, and you can’t just summarize half of a whole basketball season if you don’t know the game, don’t know the numbers.

Her next response was fake-affronted, and Nathan played along, fake-pacifying her before the conversation moved on to other topics. Basketball really isn’t her thing, but that first text, those hearts, that huge amount of warmth contained in the message -- none of that was about basketball, really.

Romain’s punch got his engine un-stalled. Mariah’s encouragement gave him momentum.  Nathan turned back to his studying with renewed focus, and as the hours ticked by, though his eyes grew dry and his neck ached from hunching over his laptop, his mind stayed sharp and clear. What could the physical irritations and exhaustions of college life really say against the exhaustion of Olympic training? All he needed was to keep his focus, keep his head about him, and he’d _fly_.

Keeping busy kept his thoughts from wandering, or lingering on the wander, which was good, because there was so much to linger on. Reminders of California surrounded him. Several of his suitemates had s.o.’s, and the ones who didn’t, wanted them and talked about it frequently. Freshman couples drunk on the _cache_ of Yale - and probably also just plain regular drunk - were regularly kicked out of the library for attempting to fuck in the law research stacks. There was at least one person in each of his classes - in some, two - who wanted to get with _Nathan Chen_ , _Figure Skater_ , _Abs Of Steel,_ and most of them were not subtle about it.

“They _might_ like you for you,” his suitemate Dinah had suggested, when one of them followed Nathan home to his dorm, ignoring the hints, until he had to bluntly turn her down at his front door. The supremely awkward moment was witnessed by three other residents of the suite and at least two hallway passerby. Nathan had wanted to sink through the floor. The girl had pointedly cried at him.

“You’ll never know unless you try. You could have at least given her a chance.”

 _She stalked me home,_ he thought.

“I’ll be sure to tell her I was the one missing out on her when I see her at our ten year reunion,” he said.

Classmates following him home was something Nathan had not actually expected to happen. His family had, or at least, half of it - three of the siblings and neither parent. “They’re not gonna care,” he’d figured. “Who even knows figure skating when it’s not the Olympics? And, well.”

Well, now he owed Janice a beer.

The weeks slid by. Nathan kept his head down, kept his mind clear, kept his focus on his work. This was training, grueling and tedious and boring, but worthwhile. Chapters memorized bit by bit, data compiling and collating in his mind, each layer built upon the one below it, like a jump that takes less than a second to execute, but took his whole life to learn.

But in-between it all, he thinks about Romain, about sitting on his bed at his apartment, Romain’s back against the footboard, Nathan’s against the headboard, and their legs lightly pressed together, knee to calf. He thinks about Mariah tucking herself against his side with her head on his shoulder, or maybe butted up against his side, pinning his arm down, with her head right in his line of sight so he can’t see his phone to swype - the way she does when she wants to annoy Nathan into putting it down

They’d been new when he left California -- _so new_ , Adam had laughed, loudly. So _so_ new. Of _course_ you get a brand new girlfriend _and_ boyfriend right before you move away for college. That’s so-- that’s _so_ , he’d said, and Nathan had grumbled and told him to finish the damn sentence, and Adam had sighed.

 _So awful timing,_ he’d said, and now he was kind supportive Adam, Adam who was the first one Nathan confided in about boys, before his siblings or his mom. Adam who knew a bit about bad timing. Nathan had let Adam pull him in, drape Nathan across his shoulder like a mournful shawl, and pet his hair soothingly.

“It’ll be okay. You will figure it out. They knew you were going away beforehand, same as you did, and you all still decided to be idiots. So clearly, it’s important enough to be idiots at each other about. And therefore, it will work out. You trust me on this, I know what I’m talking about.”

* * * *

“The worst missing is you guys. It’s absolutely the worst part of being out here, missing you guys.” Nathan knows he’s repeating himself, but it’s worth repeating.

“Wow, I’ll tell your mom you said that,” Romain laughs, and Nathan can hear Mariah laughing too, more lightly. They’re on a three-way call, but her phone is clearly not as near to her face as Romain’s is to his, so the volume isn’t even. Nathan raises his own voice, talking over Romain’s teasing.

“No, listen, I mean it,” Nathan says, and there’s a scratchy shuffling and then Mariah’s voice is nearer.

“We know you do, Nate,” she says, and Nathan interrupts that, too, because he’s frustrated and he’s tired and lecture was brutal.

“I _can’t_ miss you guys like I can miss my family or my house or - or hell, my rink! Raf! Fuck, even the beach! I have _reasons_ that I can miss those. Nobody asks you, but _why_ do you miss them that much? You’ll see them at Christmas. You can just talk to them online,” he says, and his voice winds tighter and tighter as he relays each successive barb, each wound.

It’s been eating at him, chewing into his soul, and today, for some reason, today is boiling point. Today is boiling _over_ , and it’s fortunate that the hallway is generally empty as Nathan marches down it, not bothering to keep his voice down. He digs in his backpack for his key, and wedges his phone between his shoulder and ear when the broken skate laces in the front pocket, which he’s still not remembered to throw out even though he tells himself to every time, get tangled around the keys.  It takes two hands to wrench everything free, and then Nathan nearly drops his phone, and cusses as he catches it; cusses as he brings it up to his ear; cusses once more, with barely more than a sigh behind it, as he gets his dorm door open, as he steps inside and leans against the door, head falling back till it hits with a muffled thump.

“I can’t miss my _friends_ the way I miss you. I can’t-- I have to--”

His voice breaks. He can hear hurried shuffling, a whisper, the soft noises of two bodies shifting closer, curling together around a single phone. His phone beeps in his ear - he checks the screen, and sees that Mariah’s line has hung up. He hears another beep, softer - he’s on speakerphone. He swears he can hear both of them breathing.

“S’stupid,” he says, shoving on the feelings that are swelling up inside his lungs, swelling till there’s no room for his lungs to fill themselves, til he can’t breathe simply because there isn’t enough room to do so around his heart, and rallies. He shoves on the feelings, pushing downward, sitting on them like a suitcase that doesn’t want to close. He’ll _make_ it close, damnit. He can’t stand here like a mope against the door of the apartment. Someone else will need to come in. Nathan kicks off his shoes and scuffs his way through the common area to his bedroom, and either his resting pissed face or the fact that he’s on a call prevents any of the suitemates from trying to interrupt him.

“It’s not stupid,” Mariah is saying softly, and Nathan wishes he could feel her fingers laced through his own. He doesn’t have a strong sense memory of what it feels like, because they’ve only held hands like this a few times. Only had a few crying fits, and no fights yet. They don’t know how their hands fit together this way, fingers interlocked, instead of the flat, easy palm to palm of friends. And through all these months that he’s supposed to be _learning_ that, all these tender first months, Nathan’s off learning everything else in the world except what it feels like when Mariah strokes her thumb over the back of his hand.

So, _so_ new.

Nathan wishes for the uncomfortable crunch of knuckles against each other that happens because you grip too hard, or splay your fingers a bit too widely for the other person to match. He wishes for the awkward laugh that would follow, then the genuine soft laugh to follow that - so soft, it’s barely more than a smile with sound.

He’s listening to them, but he can’t find that smile. He tries to form it, because smiling concretely helps you feel better, as his mother’s voice in his mind reminds him over and over, but he can’t find the shape of it. It falls off his face, and he flops backwards onto his bed, bookbag discarded on the floor at the foot of his bed, and rolls onto his side to shove his face into a pillow. That much sticks, at least.

“Nate, are you hearing me?” Romain, now, and Nathan realizes he’s been only half-listening to the platitudes, the it’s okays, the we miss you toos, that Mariah has been offering.  He feels bad, and then he also thinks, _she doesn’t yet know how to hold me, how to keep me from slipping between her fingers right now_ , and it hurts - not because Mariah doesn’t know, but because he wants to be teaching her. He wants to be learning with them, working this out with them, talking about his day with them.

“Yeah, I hear you, bro, sorry. I’m all in my head,” Nathan says, feeling even cruddier than he did before. “Here’s me barely listening to you guys and I’m the one who called all urgent. Dick move,” he says, “I’m sorry.”

“Nate, hey. _Nate_. Listen.” Romain’s voice is strong, blunt, and Nathan actually stops to listen.

“We miss you too, Nate.” From a little bit further away, Mariah’s voice, soft, a breathy echo. “We do, we do.”

“I know, I know. It’s -- I shouldn’t be so self conscious ‘bout this shit,” Nathan says, but Romain cuts him off yet again.

“Hey. Nathan, jeez, come on, listen to yourself. Be sad if you gotta. Be happy if you can. But let it happen.”

Nathan rolls onto his back, covering his face with one palm and a groan. “That is so much easier said than done.”

“You’re thinking about it all wrong,” Mariah says, and giggles. Nathan’s not sure what’s giggle-worthy right now. “Don’t think about it like what you _should_ do. Think about what you _want_ to do.”

“Want? I want to be done with finals, I want to be _home_ , I want to see you guys.”

“No no, not that,” Romain says, and Nathan hears something that might be a very faint whisper - or might just be the phone getting moved. He concentrates on Romain’s voice. It’s always rich, rounded on all the vowels and half the consonants, and it is today, too, but there’s something else as well. Nathan’s not used to hearing Romain sound this brusque. Like the syllables of all his words are being... pushed? Is Romain angry?

“What do you want to do, about your feelings? You say, you should not miss us like this. But do you want to?”

“No, I want to _be_ there,” Nathan snaps, before he realizes what Romain meant. “Oh. Yes. I want to miss you, I wanna…”

Mariah’s voice is absolutely delicate, careful. “Want to?”

Nathan knows - knew - she had this delicacy in her, obviously, but there’s knowing and then there’s being on the receiving end of it. It’s so sweet, so tender, and for a moment Nathan feels like his heart, his emotions, are a baby bird’s eggshell cupped in her palm. Fragile.

Then she _giggles_ , and there’s a soft smack of a hand on skin, and Romain muttering something.

Nathan feels like a fist just closed around the eggshell, and the pieces are stabbing his lungs and heart.

“I wanted,” he explodes, voice loud, getting up off his bed just far enough to kick his bedroom door closed, “To _tell people_ why they need to back the hell off. But fuck, maybe I don’t have anything to tell them, huh?”

“Nate--!” Mariah sounds like he slapped her. Nathan feels like that’s fair, because he’s feeling slapped right now, too.

“If I’m interrupting something, Jesus, I’ll just _go_ , okay? You could have just said something.”

“Nate,” Romain says, but Nathan’s already hit _End Call_.

Immediately, he regrets it. He lays in the deadened, thick silence of his dorm bedroom while his stomach twists in knots, wringing itself tighter and tighter like a dishrag, until all the bile in it has been squished entirely out into his muscles, into his bones. His tongue feels thick and gray in his mouth, and he pulls off his glasses to scrub angrily at the corners of his eyes with the back of one hand.

He didn’t want to snap at them. It’s none of his goddamn business what they’re doing, or that they’re doing it without him -- he’s going to be gone for four years, at least, and that’s on top of the normal amount of distance, both literal and schedule-wise, their profession puts between them, and he can’t expect them to just _never_ , especially not for the sake of some fluke that--

Sure, yeah, the kisses were good, the kisses felt _great_ , and he _knows_ they felt that much too, but that’s just kisses. That was just kisses, and he shouldn’t have-- let himself believe--

His phone is ringing.

“What,” he answers, barely taking the time to check that it is, in fact, Romain calling him back. It is. The acid in Nathan’s bones still feels awful, but it’s also a relief to have Romain back on the line. Nathan wants somewhere to _aim_ all this. “You should have just said, instead of letting me talk your ears off for half an hour and bore the shit out of you when you were-- were _occupied_ ,” he spits.

“Nathan, we interrupted our _occupation_ ,” Romain says, and he pronounces it the French way, which sends a completely unfair frission down Nathan’s spine. “Because my phone rang, and it was you.”

“Yeah, so you should have...just…” Even Nathan’s anger can’t run faster than that very simple train of logic, and Nathan falls back against his pillows feeling like the wind’s just been popped right out of his sails.

“We could have ignored it,” Mariah says, and this time Nathan’s _certain_ her voice is breathy, _that kind_ of breathy.

His stomach stops spinning itself around its wash cycle. Nathan thinks he’s got vertigo, too many emotional extremes in way too little time, and his voice wobbles, knock-kneed, on its way from his throat to his lips.

“You didn’t,” he says, stating the impossible and the obvious in the same two words.

“We didn’t,” Romain says, leaning in close to the phone, and his voice is so rich and Nathan is _so_ tired of being so weak to European accents, it’s just completely fucking unfair.

“We stopped,” Romain continues, “Because we both wanted to answer you more than continue. We can always resume later, right?”

Mariah laughs, a bright short one that hiccups out of her, and Nathan smiles despite himself because he knows exactly what face she makes when she laughs that particular laugh.

“We only started again because you were so frustrated about _us_ , and I thought - I wanted you to feel included, Nate,” she says, and she’s so sorry. Nathan can hear it, before she says it, and she does, twice.

“Really, _so_ sorry. I thought you’d --”

“Well,” Nathan says, and he’s surprised he’s even got a voice to speak with, “You guys...you’re half as lonely, because there’s the two of you, and you were here first, and--” He doesn’t have words for everything, and he doesn’t want to find them, either. Spelling it all out, saying it aloud - it feels dangerous to do that, when they’re this far apart.  He mumbles, lamely. “It’s different.”

“You thought we changed our minds,” Romain says, and it _hurts_ to hear it laid out that coldly.

“I didn’t... _want_ to,” Nathan says, finally, and the soft, deep exhale he gets from Romain tells him that it was worth the difficulty to admit it, and to admit it that way, as an answer to Romain’s question.

“I wanted to believe in you guys,” he says. It’s easier to admit now that Romain did the hardest part for him. “But we - this, um, it’s... _we’re_ … new.”

“So new,” Mariah says, in her Adam voice, because repeating Ripponisms is only half as effective when you don’t have the inflection to go with it. Nathan winces, bites his lip, tries to count the crossbars in the ceiling tile above his bed. It might be bringing his heart rate down. He doesn’t feel like checking right now. Just breathe, and try not to feel _too_ stupid.

“He told you that one, too?” Nathan asks, and Mariah snorts.

“He _keeps_ telling us that one, and I can’t tell at this point if he’s trying to haze us, as your official Third-Eldest Dad, or just fuck with us.”

“He might just like the sound of his own voice,” Nathan deadpans, and they all three laugh even though they know it’s not true.

“I’m sorry we haven’t been making you feel like you’re in this relationship,” Mariah says, and Nathan’s stomach swoops. “I was trying! I don’t send that many heart emoji to _anyone_.”

“Not even me,” Romain chimes in. “Nate...you’re definitely not imagining things.”

“Unless it’s imagining we don’t like you, because we do,” Mariah adds.

“I think I need things spelled out a bit more,” Nathan says, and he laughs his way through the sheepishness. He’s feeling really stupid and like he’s just demonstrated an unjustifiably short fuse, which is a new feeling. He’s not used to losing his temper, and especially not over something so...silly.

But before his embarrassment can grow into full-blown chagrin, Nathan hears something else filtering over his phone speaker. He shifts the phone in his palm, lines it up better, and his eyes fly open when he realizes what it is - what it _sounds_ like it is.

No way. Even despite the _entire_ conversation that they just had, Nathan’s brain still manages to jam the clutch and stall out when confronted with--

“Are you--”

Romain’s laugh shakes roundly across the line. “Mmm-hmm.”

“Wait, wait. Are you -- really, right _now_?”

There’s a slurping noise, a soft wet smack. “Yeah,” Mariah says, and her voice is carved out and thick.

Yep. It’s a blowjob. He’s hearing his - his boyfriend get blown, he’s hearing his girlfriend blow his boyfriend, right now, from the other end of the country.

Nathan must have made some kind of noise - probably very stupid sounding - because then there’s her laugh, his husky sigh.

“Catch up, Nate,” Romain chuckles.

Nathan doesn’t remember sitting up, or putting his own phone on speaker, but he’s halfway across his room, locking his bedroom door.  “Okay okay okay, hold-- hold on,” he sputters.

Mariah laughs, and there’s the sound of her smacking her lips - definitely extra loud and messy for effect, but it’s _having_ its effect so Nathan can’t even complain - and Romain clicking his tongue.

“Tick tock, Nate.”

“You are SO lucky my suitemates aren’t-- there isn’t--” He doesn’t know what he’s saying, just that he can’t find his damn headphones, and it sounds like Mariah’s still slicking her way along Romain’s cock, and Nathan’s about two seconds away from digging out the really old crappy wired headphones just to have _something_ , when his hand _finally_ hits the familiar contour of his airpods’ charging and carrying case in the bottom of his bag.

“Fuck, here. Okay, okay.”

Nathan puts in his airpods, connects them, and the few seconds that it takes for the Bluetooth to connect feel like an eternity. Then, suddenly, it’s connected, the sound switches over, and her breath fills his ears, surrounding him.

It punches the air from his lungs.  Logically, Nathan knows that if he were there with them, or them here with him, he wouldn’t be able to hear Mariah breathing inside of his _head_ , that the headphones are in fact changing the sound, shifting his sense of where it’s coming from. Emotionally, he doesn’t give a fuck.

  
Nathan scrambles back onto his bed, not sure what to do with himself - sit? Lay down? What’s the etiquette for -- yeah, no, he’s not even going to finish that question. He settles for sitting in the middle, one knee drawn up against his chest, arms wrapped around his leg to hug it to him. His phone is somewhere on the bed nearby. He’s not sure if his eyes are open or not anymore, because the acid buzz of dorm lighting and the blank white walls and old, dinged maple wood furniture might as well be invisible, as his mind’s eye sculpts the scene that he’s hearing.

Her mouth’s open. And the phone’s close to her face, because Nathan can hear every time she licks her lips, and-- Romain groans -- it must be fairly close to his, as well. They’re facing each other? Not a blowjob anymore. They breathe together, Romain’s breath whooshing out of him, Mariah’s catching, breaking across the middle of an inhale. The second half of the inhale is high, a pleasured whimper, tremulous at the end. Romain rumbles, satisfied.

Nathan can see it all. Mariah’s sitting astride Romain, who’s reclining on his mountain of pillows on the bed. Romain’s holding the phone in his palm, holding it up near her face, so Nathan can hear her breathing while she leans forward and her hair slips over her shoulder, swinging down to sweep across Romain’s chest.

“He’s inside me,” she murmurs, and _god_.

She’s under his skin, _they’re_ under his skin, and Nathan slams his head back into his pillow, giving up, shoving his hand past the waistband of his sweats and into his briefs as fast as possible.

As he’s wrapping his fingers around the base of his cock, Nathan hears a fumble, a soft clatter, laughter from further away than before. Then it’s Romain’s breath in his head, his midrange husking rumble, saying _hello_.

“Hello, hi, Nate, how’re you doing,” Romain asks, as if they’ve just passed the phone around the room at a party, as if this moment is no more remarkable--

As if he’s not breaking each word into pieces, filling the gaps with soft breathy grunts, leaving Nathan’s imagination to connect the dots. Dot, dot, dot: each time the backs of Mariah’s thighs settle onto Romain’s hips. Each abbreviated sigh, each soft wet noise – he clearing his throat, she licking her lips.

And before Nathan’s ready, way _way_ before he’s ready, they’re laughing together, their laughter warm and rough and full in his head, inside his _skull_ , and he’s going to make sure he never loses the charging case for these headphones because this is. This is magical.

Their laughter goes distant, and the sound changes again. Now he can hear smacking, thick and wet and slow, and a slurping noise that makes him squeeze his eyes shut even tighter than they already were because it’s embarrassing, _oh my god_ it’s embarrassing, but also it’s one of the hottest things Nathan’s ever heard. The phone is on Romain’s belly now. Nathan can picture exactly where it is. Face up, hot metal back resting on the hard low plane where Romain’s abs become Romain’s pelvis and a line of coarse hair delineates the sharply cut contour between each sectioned muscle. The bottom of the phone, the microphone right next to the charging port, is facing down, facing Mariah, facing--

Facing her cunt, every time she sinks down. Facing her as she’s taking Romain inside. The sounds of her move: further away, then closer, then further, then closer, and the rhythm of her rising and falling, the sound of her pussy around Romain’s dick, paces the rate of Nathan’s hand around his own.

Biting his lip, Nathan loses the fight to stay fully silent, lets out a bitten-down, strained yearning groan, and he was pretty sure he was on speakerphone but now he knows he _must_ be, because they both sigh immediately, in _response_ , and--

“Nate,” Mariah breathes, and her voice cracks twice across the _a_. He chokes back another moan, just to hear her say his name that way, and he’s glad he did because Romain’s murmuring encouragement, telling him how they both hope he’s liking this.

“Let us hear you,” Romain says, and how - _how -_ does something so filthy also sound so tender, so careful?  Nathan’s head is swimming. “We want to hear you. Talk to me, Nate, tell me.”

“Tell me how it feels,” Mariah asks him, and then she grunts with effort and Romain’s breath leaves him in one great punch of wind and Nathan bucks against his own palm, _knowing_ what Romain’s face looked like just there, the fold of his brows together and upward, the way he bites his lower lip when he’s concentrating, the dark feather of his eyelashes on his cheeks.

“Tell him how you feel, hearing him like this,” Mariah murmurs, and Nathan didn’t know he was dating a succubus but apparently he is, and all he can do is whine, teeth clenched, all his breath stuck in his nose as he strains and his toes curl and he _aches_.

They’re both breathless, both as affected as he is, and Nathan knows - somehow he knows - that it’s him, making this better than usual, making this new and electric and as intense for them as it is for him. It’s _his_ voice filling the air between them, the phone like the heat of his palm on Romain’s belly, touching, urging, encouraging, riding with them as Mariah’s rhythm bounces rougher, going jerky and irregular. Her palm smacks down on Romain’s chest, and Nathan hears his own voice urging her along, telling her _good, keep going, go, go, Mariah, come on. Come on._

She begins to shudder, and Nate can hear Romain move, hear his hands and the sheets shuffling under his feet - moving, angling himself for leverage. Romain’s gritted-off grunts, softer at the start but now short and throaty and urgent, sink into Nathan’s skin, sink in deep at the nape of his neck, and the arch of open air between his neck and shoulders and the bed only grows and grows as Nathan arches his back, drives the top of his head into his pillow, clawing at the sheets with his free hand for grounding, for balance, for any kind of anchor he can find.

But both of their voices, their breath and groans and whimpers and soft, pleading _need_ , are filling his ears, inside his head, rattling around in his skull until there’s barely room for himself in there anymore.

“Nate--”

_“Nate!”_

He doesn’t realize that he hasn’t been breathing until he starts again, rough gasps following his grunts of orgasm, shaking, fingers and toes trembling, a tingle scraping around under his skin like his foot fell asleep except it was his whole body.

When he opens his eyes the ceiling looks wrong. The room looks wrong, and he looks up, around, over his head, trying to get his bearings. He doesn’t even realize that he was expecting to find Romain’s face there, smiling at him upside down, until it isn’t there anymore. He looks down the length of his body, and it’s just his hand and his filthy briefs and beyond that his legs and his feet and his half-clean half-dirty pile of clothes shoved over to the wall side corner of his bed. No Mariah, no beaming round-cheeked impish smile and soft hair and troublemaker eyes.

“Are you okay, Nate?”

“Still with us, man?”

Sound fades back into his awareness, and their voices are still in his head, soft and exhausted, sated and cautious, but it feels wrong now, mean and taunting. Too much. Nathan rips the airpods out and switches off his bluetooth so the call audio snaps back to his phone. With his clean hand he fumbles it out from under the pillow beside his head, brings it up to his ear, sighs shakily.  The endorphin crash is already sinking through him like a lead blanket and he groans, thinking about how much harder practice is going to be tonight, thinking about what muscles he just pulled in his shoulder, thinking he’s really glad Raf isn’t here to _know_ as soon as he sees him.

“Oh, Nate. It’s okay. It’s okay. We miss you too.”

“Christmas, soon, okay? We’ll see you at Christmas. Just a little longer.”

It’s cool, he says, even though it’s not, and thank you, even though he doesn’t know what he’s thanking them for, and is it totally creepy to thank your boyfriend and girlfriend for an orgasm? Is the etiquette different if the orgasm was delivered cross-country?

They’re still talking, normal things, forward-looking things, eager things.  Yeah, he says, we’ll definitely have to hang. Christmas and New Year’s both, okay? Promise me.  They promise him a breakfast date, and promise they’ll plan something special, and promise they’ll spend a whole day together.  

Nathan swallows through the knot in his throat and says, “How about just promise we’ll see each other a lot,” and they do, fervently, accompanied by a series of noises that sounds kind of they’re trying to hold hands with the phone in-between their palms. Nathan asks them what the heck are they doing, they’re going to hang up by accident, and after that, he allows Romain to rib him about his quad loop – _what the fuck happened there, man?_ – and he promises Mariah he’ll teach her all the dumb East coast slang that he’s learning.

And slowly, it doesn’t feel as bad to be stuck inside only his own skin. Slowly, he starts feeling less distant, remembering that this -- phone, contact, making do -- this counts. All the ways that they’re still with him, he’s still with them, presence extended by instagram and email and – and this. Voices, and hearing them.

These voices are theirs - only his, only hers.  There’s none other voices like them, and the people who own them are too far away, still, and will be for God knows how long into the future, stretching further than Nathan can think about, further than he can _let_ himself think about –

But these voices, laughing, soft, chiding each other, playful and conversational and normal, their new normal, are still them.  He’s not close, can’t be, but their voices are - all three of them together. Their voices are inside his skull and it’s going to be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Broke: Nathan is crushing on both Romain and Mariah  
> Woke: Both Romain and Mariah know  
> Bespoke: Nathan is overplaying the third wheel angle on their social media because he's not in fact thirdwheeling at all  
> ( twitter.com/aboutNathan0505/status/1082018284948598785 )  
> Galaxy Brain: threesomes. everyone threesomes.
> 
> Tons of love and thanks to my folx at KSAS and KSSC for their support and feedback and cheerleading.
> 
> Find me over on Discord in the Knife Shoes Senior Circuit server, screaming about these and other figure skaters.  
> .


End file.
